I had WinNT and Mandrake installed (both on the first hard drive). For reasons unknown to anyone, I decided to installed OpenLinux eDesktop 2.4 instead. To make a long story short, I installed this OpenLinux on both my drives and now WinNT is gone and I can't reinstall it.

My system boots now on the first drive with OpenLinux just fine.

If I try to boot with the WinNT setup CD, it reads both disks as being 'unformatted or damaged' and if I ask NT to format a partition, it just hangs.

Any ideas?

(I would almost be willing at this point to forget about the real NT and just keep OpenLinux and install an emulator so I can run IE5.0 (I am a developer so I have to test on IE5.0) but I can't even get tar to run properly so I can't install Willows TWIN 3.1.13 which I downloaded)

Any help is much appreciated--I am a programmer and I am not able to work at present.

Hershel Robinson

Most likely to get NT back on you're going to have to start all over and FDISK(MSDOS) and format everything for NT to install. Windows 2000 never seemed to have a problem with my Ext2, ReiserFS, NTFS(5), and FAT16 partitions on the same drive, but if you alreay have NT4(?) then stick with it.

That's the best solution that I can think of...but if you're daring, I think this will fool NT. By using the FDISK on the RedHat 6.2 CD(It's prolly in other places too) you can change the ID of the partions to be FAT16 so that it's not mad anymore about 'foreign' partitions. Just don't let it format them! Then after NT is done installing change them back to the old ID (write it down!) and everything should be set.